Yang Hui, Fan Lin, Yin Hongshan
School of Foreign Languages, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China.
Artificial Intelligence and Human Languages Lab, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jan 18;14:1101241. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1101241. eCollection 2023.
Lexical inferencing functions as one of the most important and effective skills used in language comprehension pertaining to psychological, cognitive and neurological aspects. Given its complex nature and crucial role in language comprehension, lexical inferencing has received considerable attention. The present study visualized the knowledge domain of the research on lexical inferencing based on a total of 472 articles collected from Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection of Thomson Reuters from 2001 to 2021. The bibliographic data were analyzed through co-cited articles, co-citation clusters of references, and co-occurring keywords to identify holistic intellectual landscape of lexical inferencing with special focus on its intellectual structure and base, and hot research topics. The main intellectual base includes probability of activating lexical inferencing in working memory and encoding in long-term memory, the role of lexical inferencing in reading comprehension, in connected speech, in children's derivation under pragmatic context, and in psychological and neurocognitive processes underlying language processing mechanism. Hot topics are comprised the impacts of lexical inferencing on language acquisition and comprehension (written and spoken language comprehension), the factors (context variables, vocabulary knowledge, and morphological awareness) affecting the presence and efficacy of lexical inferencing, and the time course of lexical inferencing during reading. Critically, the results of this study demonstrated that the contribution of lexical inferencing to language comprehension was strongly correlated with learner-related and discourse-related variables. The study shed valuable light on the understanding of the intellectual background and the dynamic patterns of lexical inferencing over the past two decades, thereby future work in lexical inferencing is suggested as well.
词汇推理是语言理解中使用的最重要、最有效的技能之一，涉及心理、认知和神经学方面。鉴于其复杂的性质以及在语言理解中的关键作用，词汇推理受到了相当多的关注。本研究基于从汤森路透Web of Science（WoS）核心合集中收集的2001年至2021年的472篇文章，可视化了词汇推理研究的知识领域。通过共被引文章、参考文献的共被引聚类和共现关键词对文献数据进行分析，以识别词汇推理的整体知识格局，特别关注其知识结构和基础以及热门研究主题。主要知识基础包括工作记忆中激活词汇推理和长期记忆中编码的概率、词汇推理在阅读理解、连贯言语、语用语境下儿童推导以及语言处理机制背后的心理和神经认知过程中的作用。热门话题包括词汇推理对语言习得和理解（书面和口头语言理解）的影响、影响词汇推理存在和效果的因素（语境变量、词汇知识和形态意识）以及阅读过程中词汇推理的时间进程。至关重要的是，本研究结果表明，词汇推理对语言理解的贡献与学习者相关变量和语篇相关变量密切相关。该研究为理解过去二十年词汇推理的知识背景和动态模式提供了宝贵的见解，同时也为词汇推理的未来研究方向提出了建议。
